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Feb. 5, 2025 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
21:16
Do We Now Own Gaza?

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Hello, everyone.
I hope you are well.
Well, we seem to be cursed with living in interesting times.
We are definitely cursed with living in ambiguous times in the sense that I don't really know what to make of Donald Trump's dual press conference with Bibi Netanyahu.
Even after...
The question and answer session where Trump used typically some colorful language to describe what happened.
The takeaway seems to be that we now own Gaza.
We own it.
We're going to level it and then we're going to build it back beautiful, better than ever.
He actually said to a journalist that it's going to be like the Riviera.
And I saw some Republicans like Nancy Mace.
Yeah, it's going to be like Mar-a-Lago in the Middle East.
Sounds great.
The other thing that seems to be happening here is that Palestinians are going to be ethnically cleansed from their native land and pushed off into Egypt or Jordan or maybe whoever would take them.
I don't think they're going to be treated as refugees.
In the United States, because that would generate some backlash among conservatives.
And so throughout the press conference, there seemed to be this sort of shell game going on in terms of whom exactly are you referring to?
When Trump says, you know, we can't do anything now.
It's terrible.
It's a rubble.
We're going to build it back better.
There seemed to be the implication that the Palestinians would...
Now be given a great new place, you know, the Trump Tower and casino and all of that.
But I don't think that's what he means because he's also talking about, again, what's definitionally ethnic cleansing that is moving people out of their land out of there.
So who's going to enjoy this new Gaza?
It seems to be Israelis, although, again, that wasn't said directly.
Owning it.
Who owns Gaza now?
I don't know quite what this means.
I mean, the United States owns some foreign territory.
The United States, the federal government, obviously owns states within the continuous U.S., although that's not really how we think of it.
Does he want to own Gaza like he might want to own Greenland or own Canada?
What does this actually mean?
Is he meaning that we're going to morally own it?
I think regardless of his intentions, I think that's what's going to happen.
The troops that are going to go in there and wipe out the remnants of Hamas are going to be U.S. troops.
The troops are going to occupy Gaza in effect.
A future ownership stake?
I don't think so.
I think what will ultimately happen with this is that Israel will be given this territory at some point, and the Greater Israel Project, including an annexation of Gaza, is underway.
Now, let me just say a few things about this.
First off, I don't think moving I get it.
This is the definition of ethnic cleansing.
This isn't genocide, exactly.
That word has also been used.
This is clearly an example of ethnic cleansing.
That being said, Is this not the least bad of all solutions?
I could certainly imagine worse solutions.
And to be honest, I could imagine worse solutions under a liberal government that is a democratic regime that wants to have it both ways.
In the sense that you just create the worst of all possible worlds.
So Democrats are far more likely to talk about not just Palestinian human rights and safety, but Palestinian nationhood.
Republicans, no.
They don't talk that way.
Democrats are much more likely to subsidize and defend humanitarian aid coming in there to Gaza.
At the same time, they're never going to really stop giving Netanyahu and company more bombs and weapons to destroy the Gazans and create this rubble, prehistoric situation that we have now.
So they want to have it both ways, and it turns into this awful situation where they're...
They're vaguely promising Palestinian nationhood one day and, in effect, encouraging them to stay there, helping them survive while they're in Gaza, while they're, at the end of the day, beholden to Israel and, at the end of the day, providing Israel weapons.
I do think that's a sort of worst of all possible worlds.
It's, at the very least, totally incoherent.
So I want to be fair here.
It's easy to jump on Donald Trump.
For outright supporting ethnic cleansing, and that's what it should be called, etc.
But I do want to be fair.
If I were a Palestinian, at some point you've just got to grasp that you have lost, that you're getting your ass kicked, that no one's coming to save you, and that surviving somewhere else is better.
Now, plenty of them would disagree with this and want to fight harder, to die fighting Israel, etc.
That's their prerogative.
But at some point, you sort of have to cut your losses.
So...
I think Trump should be criticized for this.
People should call it for what it is.
But to think of it as the worst thing in the world, no, it's not the worst thing in the world.
Some other aspects of this, the ownership aspect, this does seem to be that U.S. troops will have boots on the ground.
Now, to be fair, maybe that's better.
If I were Palestinian, I would rather see an American troop with the U.S. flag lording over me than I would an Israeli troop.
American troops are much more likely to follow the...
I mean, look, I get it.
I'm not naive about dirty wars in the Middle East, etc.
However, I'm just saying, of the horrible option and even more horrible option, I would choose American boots on the ground.
So from the Palestinian standpoint, again, it's not the worst thing in the world.
From the U.S. standpoint, it might be.
again, I find it difficult to believe that America is going to own Gaza.
Gaza is a very small sliver of territory on the seaside of the Mediterranean that has been effectively surrounded by Israel.
It's been an open air concentration camp.
A lot of people say that.
They say because it's true.
We're going to own this territory.
There are gas rights and natural resources, I guess.
It's still very tiny, and you're in this...
Very weird situation where you're surrounded by the Israeli state, who's, of course, an ally and a client of the U.S. empire.
Just odd.
But the other thing about it is that you are putting American troops in a situation where they are in all likelihood going to face terrorist actions, hostile fire,
et cetera, et cetera.
It is very easy to foresee that there is going to be some terrible incident with Hamas or someone else in which a dozen US troops get blown up.
And then we blame Iran and whatever.
It's not just an attack on Israel.
It's an attack on the US. After all, we own it.
So, I don't...
I think this is an extremely precarious situation.
And I don't fully know if Donald Trump recognized what he's getting into.
And is this a guy, he seems to be operating on this logic of real estate and luxury real estate.
We're going to own it.
It's going to be the Riviera of the Middle East.
Amazing vacation resort.
Okay. But the idea that...
This land wouldn't be given to Israel at some point also strikes me as extremely implausible.
So in effect, we're doing the fighting and dying.
We're taking on the risk.
We are engaging in the billions of dollars of cleanup and leveling and rebuilding that will take place just to give it to Israel.
I mean, I'm sorry, but it...
At some point, that's rather outrageous.
Isn't it the rule when you go into an antique store, you break it, you buy it?
I mean, I understand how it's, in some ways, it would be sort of bizarre to expect Israel to now treat the Palestinians or the people who live there with any sort of decency after what's been done.
Nevertheless, isn't this their problem?
Isn't there something to be said for America first and whatever?
We're going to spend a decade rebuilding this place and investing billions of dollars only to hand it over to Israel and their greater Israel project from the river to the sea?
Very strange.
And on top of that, there's the issue of this leading directly to war, confrontation with Iran, Hamas.
Militant attacks US personnel.
We figure out pretty easily, or we simply lie about it, that Iran sponsored these people, provided them the weapons, etc.
Next thing you know, you're directly in war with Iran.
Is that the endgame here?
It's certainly worth considering.
But I would say this, and I've actually been fair to Trump during this stream.
Ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians to Jordan or Egypt, assuming that's possible, is not the worst outcome.
It just simply isn't.
Secondly, American troops on the ground in Gaza, even from a Palestinian standpoint, that's not actually the worst outcome.
Trump is bumbling and fumbling, but maybe he's sort of disrupting this horrible status quo of the liberals.
Where they want to protect the Palestinians, talk about their nationhood, and also just allow them to be killed en masse.
I mean, is not some sort of disruption in this situation better, or at least a change worth saying?
But I would say this just in closing.
So I was just on a space, and I was talking about this as someone, this idea came to my head.
So Freudian psychoanalysis.
Just wait for it, and I'll get there.
Freudian psychoanalysis is a theory based on the notion that what was once unspoken, unconscious, becomes conscious.
It is put into words.
So let's say you are a patient of a psychoanalyst and you've got major daddy issues.
Something happened in your childhood that you have not really dealt with or even confronted.
And so you're having dreams and you can't get to sleep and you're looking to partners who are the worst possible ones for you due to this trauma.
Psychoanalysis, the promise of it is that you finally get...
To the original trauma.
You finally, what is unspoken and unspeakable and kind of traumatizing and destroying, you actually put it into words and you deal with it.
You can manage it.
Maybe you could overcome it, even.
At the very least, it's better once things are sort of clear.
So, what I was thinking about, so I'm in my mid-40s.
I can definitely remember the Iraq War and the run-up to the Iraq War.
At that time, if you said, if your criticism of the Iraq War was that, ah, this is a big waste of time and treasure and money, we might get killed, it might create chaos, that was sort of the acceptable...
liberal critique, maybe even libertarian or paleo-conservative critique of the Iraq War.
Now, if you said...
I don't support the Iraq War because it's a war for oil.
That's kind of on the borderline of what's acceptable.
You might get a lot of pushback, even from critics of the war.
If you said, I don't support the Iraq War because it's a war for Israel.
Then you were treated as a crank.
You were a right-wing anti-Semite.
You were a Marxist.
You were a crazy person, conspiracy theorist, etc., etc., etc.
The fact is, Netanyahu wanted the Iraq War.
Netanyahu established the intellectual foundations for the Iraq War.
The Iraq War fits into a Likudist plan for the Middle East.
So it was, on some level...
And certainly not entirely, a war for Israel.
So that was 20 years ago.
You couldn't say these things out loud.
Maybe now you see where I'm going with this.
When Donald Trump wants to remove Palestinians from Gaza, ship them off to another Middle Eastern country, put American forces...
On the ground in order to rebuild the Holy Land that will soon be integrated into the Greater Israel Project.
I don't know.
Maybe it's time for the Third Temple or something.
I don't know.
It's been 2,000 years.
Why not?
Well, when a situation like that is so clear, you almost have to put it into words.
You can't beat around the bush or try to claim that it's something else.
This is not a war for democracy.
George W. Bush actually believed in democracy.
He believed his own bullshit.
He was high in his own supply.
He, after all, allowed the Gazans to vote.
That's why Hamas won in 2005 or 2006, I believe.
And that was one stone in this path that led us to where we are today.
He actually believed his own bullshit.
George W. Bush.
Say what you will about him.
At this point, in terms of our relationship with Israel and Gaza, you cannot claim that this is anything other than a war for Israel.
It is a war for the Jewish Holy Land.
Period. End of statement.
It's actually nothing else.
And some leftists who claim that it's all about mineral rights.
That's ridiculous.
It's obviously about this.
And I think there's this way in which Donald Trump makes things that were formally implicit or unconscious explicit and conscious.
He moves from soft power, things that were sort of assumed that were consensual, and he moves to just outright hard power.
I think that's what we're seeing even with the destruction of U.S. aid.
Or deconstruction of USAID.
Lots of criticism of USAID are certainly warranted.
But it was, if anything, a sort of soft power effort at, you know, maybe funding some revolutionaries here, maybe sponsoring musical theater in Ireland over there.
But it was all about consensus and soft power, influence, all these kinds of things that liberals are rather good at.
And certainly think about a lot more than conservatives do.
But with Trump, why are we wasting a cent of taxpayer dollars on that?
Let's just threaten them with tariffs.
Let's just ship a few more billion dollars in bombs to Israel.
Let's do that to Ukraine as well.
And let's demand rare earth minerals from Ukraine as a deal, a transaction.
For our supporting Ukraine.
There's no more soft power.
It's all hard power.
It's all do this or else.
And maybe, if you're nice, we can make a deal.
But there's no more consensus.
There's no more idealism around the American project and the American empire.
Now, in many ways, I think this is, in an ironic way, I think it's almost a good thing.
We're not lying anymore.
We're not persuading anyone.
We're simply beating them over the head with a stick.
Which is, at the very least, honest, you know?
Let's just be honest about it.
Palestinians, get out of here.
Holy land, that's yours, Israel.
There's something more honest about that as opposed to the cloying, lying nature of liberals.
This is...
Perhaps the biggest backhanded compliment anyone could ever give, but it actually is a compliment.
And so I think that's where we are.
Now, what does this mean for the American empire?
I do think that moving from soft power to hard power is a sign of decline.
A lot of conservatives probably think this is the new golden age.
Everything's going to get so much better.
It's going to be so wonderful with Trump.
We're not going to get ripped off by the rest of the world.
Whether we got ripped off by the rest of the world in the Bretton Woods system or the unipolar moment or the Cold War remains to be seen.
I certainly wouldn't describe it that way.
But we're moving from some sort of soft power consensus to a hard power, do this or else, and maybe we'll make a deal.
I think that is a sign of decline.
The Cold War institutions like USAID are being dismantled.
Any sort of rules-based order consensus is being dismantled.
But the empire is not being dismantled.
The empire is just something else.
The empire is no longer invisible.
Now it's visible.
It was soft.
Now it's hard.
I do think that making recourse to these types of tactics with Trump, whether Trump recognizes this or not...
Whatever his motivations might be, it does spell a sort of end stage of the American empire, of the American century, the long American century.
And towards that, I have mixed feelings.
The American century was a pretty good century.
We did a lot of good things.
The world is better, but all things come to an end.
Just some thoughts.
Hope you enjoy them.
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